DIY Oil/Bromoil Ink - Pigment + ______?

[Whiteymorange]

Try sun-thickened linseed oil or stand oil, each sold to oil painters and used to make oil mediums, or even burnt plate oil, a somewhat lighter oil used by etchers to help control the viscosity of the printing ink. It saves all that boiling and burning.

Also, the fortunes of the Cabot family (famous here in Boston) are reputed to be based on a member of that clan finding a way to apply industrial scale to the scraping of soot from a glass plate held over a candle flame. This was the first reliable black pigment for paint- or so the story goes. Despite the caution in my previous post, I'm very interested in seeing what you get.

[holmburgers]

That's very interesting about soot manufacturing. "Scaling up" is an art, and if you can do it better than the next guy, it's a profitable one at that.

The main reason I asked how to make my own ink is that I got a hold of some industrial pigments that are suitable for tri-color printing. Sure I could get CMY litho ink, but I thought it would be fun to make my own.

I read a very amusing thing about tri-color bromoil in an old (1940ish) American Photography volume. The author was complaining about printing color photos for publication. He said that no matter how perfect your color separations were and no matter how ideally your carbro print showed what the final print should look like, by the time you handed these over to the printing house and the whole process was done by a multitude of people employed in various functions throughout the shop, the color balance was destroyed; taken far from the original "guide" print.

The excuse on the part of the printing house was always the same; that carbro uses totally different pigments and so what works for that won't necessarily work for color half-tone printing with ink. The author therefore encouraged the use of tri-color oil prints so that the very same inks used by the printer could be used by the photographer, and finally the blame would be undebatable!

Ahh.. to be a photographer in the 40's... such enviable problems they had...